Grocery Carts

This bit of social engineering just fascinated me. A very simple way to keep from stray grocery carts scattered around the parking lot when lazy people don't bother to return them to the cart corrals.

Rows of grocery carts, neatly organized and returned to the cart corral. How do they do it?

Simple, but elegant. See that little dangle hanging in front of the cart? The carts are effectively chained together. To get the cart out, you put a coin in the handle (a quarter, or an Arubian florin which is about the same size.) That pushes out the chain holding your cart to the next one, so you can take it shopping. But don't worry, you get your coin back when you're finished. All you have to do is return the cart to the corral, then use the dangling key on the cart in front of yours to push out your coin and lock your cart to the next one. You've effectively put a 25-cent deposit on the cart, which is returned when you return the cart. Elegantly simple, and simply elegant. Remarkably effective, too!

Putting a coin in the slot releases the cart for your use

When you're finished, returning it and inserting the key to lock your cart to the stack, returns your coin.

This was my favourite store on the island anyway because I like their products so much, but even if that weren't the case, I would shop there just for this!

Road Signs

There's lots of micro-scale cultural differences that remind me that even though we're in a European-style First World country here in the southeastern Caribbean, and the streets are safe and you can drink the water, we're still living island style. Check out these road signs: 

In some cases, the meaning is fairly intuitive:

It's a pedestrian crosswalk, yes?

Others, less so:

Rocket launch area? (Actually, this signals that the road you are on is the one that has the right of way; side roads are subsidiary and must yield.)

I got pretty darn good at roundabouts. I like them, they are self-adjusting and use intersections more efficiently than traffic lights; hence, less congestion. But there's one by the airport that is 3 lanes. I tried it a couple of times when traffic was very light to see if I could learn it. That made it better but once I did change lanes wrong and heard tires squeal behind me as I forced an oncoming vehicle to brake hard. Another time I ended up trapped and going around the circle 2-1/2 times until I finally got in the correct lane to exit!

Roundabout ahead! But at least the road directions are clearly labelled. 

But sometimes, they are just plain weird. I've never before been in a place where there's an actual road to "other directions." Must be an island thing.

Not Exactly What I Had In Mind

Okay, I did say I was hoping to do new and different things, and have more adventures, in 2020 but "unexpected encounters with the health care system overseas" wasn't exactly what I had in mind!

It started out like an ordinary dive. Pretty day, and a favourite reef we have visited before. Dan was looking forward to diving in his new wetsuit, warmer and more comfortable fit than his previous one. It was the one he'd worn during our manatee encounter, and we had already gone for one dive just the previous week, and he had been very happy with its performance.

Dan is an experienced diver; here celebrating his 100th trip a few years ago.

About halfway through the dive, things began to go wrong and he was unable to keep control of his buoyancy. Perfect storm, a combination of stronger than usual current, unfamiliar equipment (not the wetsuit, but the rented BCD and weights), and just plain bad luck, and quite suddenly he was at the surface with a lot of seawater in his lungs.

There's a gap in both of our memories and things were a blur, but an ambulance ride was involved, and for me, hours by his side in a very air conditioned hospital emergency room while wearing a t shirt and shorts over a wet swimsuit.

Really high-tech health support

The hospital and staff were excellent. Language wasn’t a problem as almost everyone had English (fortunately, because while we can get by in Spanish we can’t have conversations on complex or technical subjects). He was on a positive pressure breathing machine with 100% oxygen for about 12 hours, which helped drive the water back out of his lungs and reabsorbed by his body. This was followed by canned oxygen for another 24 hours. They kept saying his blood saturation was too low, and were getting worried. But they were measuring saturation at his fingertips and he has terrible circulation and cold hands so the reading was artificially low. Clever doctor measured it again at his earlobe and learned that his recovery had been going much better than the fingertip measurements led them to believe! He had been fine for quite some time.

There was one disorienting but delightful moment when a man I met in a hallway looked at me, stared at me, and then said, "Why are you here?" Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out if I knew him ... turned out I did! He had rented us an apartment several years ago. So after I told him why I was there, I got to ask him why he was there -- he and his wife had sold the building and left the island after the winter we stayed with them. Turned out he was back doing a temporary stint at the hospital, so it was nice seeing a familiar face.

One other thing that struck me was that visiting hours were kept pretty strict, especially in ICU where he was the first 24 hours, but also in the general ward where he was the second day once he was out of immediate danger. I was given a lot more flexibility than most of the local folks, however. The explanation was that he was far from home and the situation would be far more stressful for him. While that was probably true, I'm sure everyone is stressed when a loved one is in the hospital. I was simultaneously grateful for the VIP treatment, and a bit embarrassed by my privilege as I walked past the other waiting people.

The afternoon shift in A-2 really liked him ... and really liked sending him home!

Two days later, Dan was home and feeling quite well. We rested for a day, then the next day went for a hike at our favourite spot, Ayo Rocks. We walked slowly but he had no shortness of breath. He was also able to go for a snorkel at a very calm beach (kinda like getting back on the horse) and no problems there either. We know he’s still weak; he gets shivery chills in late afternoon or early evening if he’s tired but less so every day. He’ll be fragile for a couple of months. Very thankfully no decompression injuries or lung expansion injuries or they would have airlifted him to Curaçao or Miami. As is it was bad but not that bad.

Follow up visit with the pulmonologist occurred a few days later. Dan had no permanent damage and his lungs sounded excellent. After the medical details were covered, the conversation meandered a bit. We talked about universal medical coverage (more on that below; our doctor was involved in its implementation here); about politics (we both shared a disdain for Trump and a fondness for BBC News); about Amsterdam's history of pirates and prostitutes. Diving is off the table for a long time, maybe forever, but that's sort of okay -- at least we can say "forever" again.

= = = = =
From a U.S. perspective it was interesting to see the health care differences. Here on Aruba, universal health care came about for economic advantages, but also for social reasons. The former system had a combination of private insurance for the rich, and the equivalent of Medicaid for everyone else, and the difference in quality of care was very very major. Now, people pay for their health care by a small percent deduction from their paychecks (3%, compared to, when we were working, 7% for Medicare); employers pay another 9% of payroll, and another 3% of sales tax on goods and services, all support health care. Total 15%. For staggering comparison, we pay about 15% of our income for health care now, in other words the same percentage, but that is just our portion, with my former employer, and Medicare, both picking up the greater portion of the total cost.  It totally brought home to me that statistic I read several years ago, that we spend an amazing 42 cents of every health care dollar on non-health things, mostly administrative like figuring out insurance billing codes, but also advertising and profit. The total hospital bill, for ambulance, ER, a day in ICU and a day in a regular ward, xrays, blood tests and medication, was about half what the deductible alone would have been for a similar stay in the US.

Not Elephants

Do you know what species is among elephants' closest living relatives?
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... they're gray like elephants ...
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... and big like elephants ...
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... and we've even occasionally seen some here in St Aug ...
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... I didn't say whether they lived on land or water ...
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If you guessed manatees, you got it!


I posted this question on my Facebook page and got a range of comments. See, this is what is so cool about my friends -- half of them were like, "Well, DUH, of course elephants and manatees are related;" and the other half were like "Wow, I learn the coolest things from you that I never would have guessed."

I committed in 2020 to have more adventures: go places we hadn't been before, do things we hadn't done before, and learn things we hadn't known before.  And only a week into the new year we planned the first of those adventures - a swim with manatees, in the wild.

We rented a car and drove to a section of Florida we hadn't seen before, dubbed the "Nature Coast." (All the sections of Florida's coast have these cute nicknames -- we're the "First Coast" from first settlement; Cape Canaveral area is the "Space Coast" for rocket launches, "Treasure Coast" is named for shipwrecks, etc). The area we were headed to is called the "Nature Coast" because it's so wonderfully undeveloped. We'd be visiting a spot with the poetic name Crystal River. The river's clarity comes from the thirty natural springs that add an average of 300 million gallons (1,135 million liters) of warm water to the river every day.

We booked a 1/2 day boat tour (heated, thankfully, it was a chilly January day -- but that chill was exactly what made the manatees flee the cold gulf and congregate in the warmer spring water where we saw them) and had a spectacular knowledgeable guide. Before we got in the boats to go to the not-so-secret manatee spots, we got a chance to learn some facts about these intriguing animals and their habitat. They can live in either fresh or salt water, but they like it warm. When the water gets below about 68 degrees F they seek warmth, swimming from the Gulf of Mexico up the river to the springs which are 72-74 degrees F (22C-23C) year round where we could see them in masses.  They are gentle, slow moving vegetarians, curious and with bad eyesight.  They can live to 60 years old, and generally grow to 3 meters (10 feet) long and weigh 500 kg (1,200 lb) although some have been recorded at twice that big.  But measuring them is not the same as understanding them.

"Just float," our guide and manatee whisperer José taught us. "Be quiet, let them come to you.They will be curious, they will check you out." We had just stepped off the boat and were swimming toward one edge of the warm springs where the animals liked to hang out.

At first, honestly, it was not that different from observing other fish while snorkeling or scuba diving. They did their thing, we did ours. We could observe them, but from a respectful distance. Like any aquatic creature, it was not like we could swim fast enough to catch up to them if they wanted to get away. A few members of our group did get close enough to touch the manatees. I drifted a little bit away from the group, and when I was alone, that's where the magic happened.

I swam (slowly, quietly) up to what I first thought were just big boulders on the bottom of the stream. Until I realized that boulders like that don't exist in Florida. These were mammals. Big ones, but not at all scary.

One manatee came over to figure out what I was. He slowly drifted up to me; I could see the sensitive whiskers and he put his face close to mine and looked at me with his weak, brown eye.  Another came close to me, and I lightly petted his (her?) side with a single gloved finger, almost as though he was made of glass. He rolled over, like a dog exposing his belly for a good rub - which delightedly I did. I watched a baby (well, not so small, probably a good 5 feet long!) nuzzle under its mother's left flipper to nurse.

Like many sailors, I never get tired of seeing dolphins. They have a bright, quick intelligence that is easy to anthropomorphize. They laugh, they play in the boat's wake. And I still remember the rush I felt, the first time I saw a dolphin from the dinghy instead of the boat, closer to its own eye level. But being eye to eye with the manatee in his own environment was totally different. More like meeting an old, old soul than a playful young one.  There was a slow steadiness there, and an ancient wisdom. It wasn't about whether they were more, or less, intelligent than dolphins; it was like going off in a different dimension entirely. Flailing with words, to communicate the indescribable, and things that cannot be compared directly. It was like asking which was better -- orange, seventeen, or salty? Mind=blown.

As we got back into the boat at the end of the adventure, José looked at me and said, "Your eyes look different."

"Wide with amazement?" I asked.

"They have been opened," he told me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
(All photos courtesy of River Ventures and used with permission.)

They looked a little like rounded boulders ...

Here's one coming over to check out Dan

They are so curious!

Maybe a bit like a dog's snout?

Well hello there!

Oooh! Rub my belly!

Star Trek friends -- this was like First Contact with an alien species!

Mom and baby

Back at the shop, with our fabulous guide Jose

Project Creep (or something like that)

There's an old story, or fable, about a woman who was an indifferent housekeeper. She was given a beautiful bouquet of lilies. But when she reached on the shelf to get a vase to put them in, she found the vase grimy and dirty. So she washed it until it sparkled, and then put the flowers in the clean vase on the table. The freshness of the flowers highlighted the dustiness of the table top. So then she dusted and polished the table -- and that one bright clean corner in turn contrasted with the rest of the dingy cluttered room, kicking off another cleaning session. And on and on, until her entire house was the envy of the village.

This could be a cautionary tale about project creep, about how one seemingly innocuous thing leads to another and another until it snowballs into a massive venture. Or perhaps it is inspirational, that the seeds that inspire greatness can be found in the smallest of simple things. You just never know how things are going to turn out until you begin them.

To say that the first few years we had Cinderella there were many projects to be done would be an understatement. We were ruthlessly practical in what we tackled those first years, replacing the engine, leaky fuel hoses, propane sensors.  We replaced sails, installed a heavier anchor and chain, added solar power, strengthened lifelines, and many more. We had a simple litmus test for prioritization: if it didn't make the boat safer or sail faster, it fell to the bottom of the list.

But however slowly it felt we got there in the end, ultimately we did get to where the aesthetic projects could be addressed. It started two years ago as we stripped and sanded the teak trim to bare wood and painted on eight (!) coats of glossy varnish. Well, that kicked off a project cascade just like the lady and the lily, because the shiny refinished wood didn't stand out well against the patchy faded burgundy cove stripe. A good friend with Photoshop expertise helped us explore the possibilities of various colors until we settled on a deep navy blue. Two coats of primer, three coats of paint, sanding and allowing a day to cure between each coat. I got into a rhythm.

I can't paint without ruminating the same two thoughts in my mind. One came from a shipmate on the Galeon during our second year. She really enjoyed painting or oiling the teak, a task most of us dreaded as not difficult but boring; she described it as meditative. Her attitude totally changed my attitude toward the task. (Thank you for that helpful perspective, Challie.) The second thought that I always have while painting is my hydrodynamics prof in grad school explaining the concept of thixotropic fluids. The word sounds like it describes a property of a plant that grows in the Caribbean (tropic). Actually though it's a property of some fluids that change viscosity - in this case, paint that's fairly thick when you brush it on so it doesn't drip, and then actually gets more fluid as it sets, so the brush strokes fade away.

All in all, the project was tedious and I hope we don't have to do it again any time soon, although the varnish gets scuffed and recoated every six months or so. But we've gotten so many compliments since we came back to the dock. And my heart sings every time we walk toward the boat. And that, that little tune of joy in life, I learned last summer, really matters to me.

Final detail, using a small artist brush to add silvery-white metallic paint for the scrollwork on the bow.

Don't Rush Me!

About a month ago, we turned Cinderella around in the slip, bow facing north as we always do in winter. We like being in a better position to take the strong cold north winds, and let what sunshine we have available during the season light and warm our cockpit. We've done the maneuver many times before, maybe that made us a bit complacent, or maybe we needed a reminder that every trip is at least slightly different. In any case, things didn't go exactly as planned ... we had just a bit of docking drama ...

We turned at high slack tide around 7 pm (just after dusk). Bit of miscalculation and miscommunication had us in the fairway under the minimal control of a single dockline until some friends from further up the dock came by to save the day. Wow!

Later, in the cockpit with a glass of rum, we did an after action analysis as we always do after even the simplest of trips, and certainly after things went wrong, to see what we could learn. And really, this was all about knowing that things take time, and taking our time. We had gotten home late from an appointment in Jacksonville, and had it kind of locked in our heads all day that we were going to move the boat tonight at slack tide. But because we had gotten home so late, we hadn't had time to fully discuss what each of us expected of the other.  Worse, we hadn't made sure that we had all the docklines where we expected them to be! And that was the problem; I had expected there to be two docklines; one we had just placed on the piling, and one we had left opposing it on the finger pier. Which latter one Dan had unfortunately released when we left the slip. So there was nothing for me to pull on, until we handed the errant line to the friends on the dock.

We weren't as ready as we should have been, hadn't taken the time to double check that everything was where we expected it to be due to the perceived time pressure (that really wasn't there. We could have moved just a little after the exact moment of slack tide and still been okay. We could have moved the next slack tide next morning if it got to late.) We let artificial urgency make us move before we were ready. Rookie mistake!

A month later, though, and I'm typing this while the wind howls and the boat barely moves, because the wind is coming right on the bow just like it was designed to do. The whole purpose of turning around. The additional good news is that we used the "backwards" position of the boat to finish the painting project (more on that in an upcoming post). The bad news, though, is that with our stern and cockpit to the (very public) dock, we're again living in the fishbowl. We frequently overhear comments like "Look! That boat's name is Cinderella!" or "Wow, they came all the way from Michigan!" Or people will try to peer down below. Reminds us of our days on El Galeon, Dan pointed out. The galley where we took our lunch breaks was roped off but open to the main deck that the visitors were exploring, and they'd all be curious about this part of the ship that they could see into but not go into. They're not going to learn anything from it, this part of the ship is modern, but it's hard to relax while a hundred strangers are staring at you while you try to feed your face!

Tall Ships, Road Trips, Police Cars, Too Many Bars, Shooting Stars ...

I've loved writing Life Afloat! And it's been way too long since I've written. I haven't abandoned the project; it's just that I've been too busy out having adventures to have time to write about them. But last week I got a message from someone I didn't know, on Life Afloat's Facebook page, inviting my contribution to an article she was writing. And I put on my thinking cap and churned out some ideas and sent them off. Flatteringly, less than an hour later I had an email back from her; she loved what I had sent, it was perfect for her needs, and she wanted more!

And me? I was reminded how much fun I have writing, and how much it helps me really process what I've done and what I've learned. So I'm ready to start again. I don't think I will, or can, constrain myself to posting in chronological order as things happened. Rather, it will just be stream-of-consciousness as ideas bubble up. I even thought about joining the A to Z challenge again this year, with a theme of "playing catch up." I realized that during those challenges I felt free to write about whatever, free from my self imposed constraint of doing things in order, and it was a lot of fun. But I didn't want to wait until April for the challenge, so I'm starting now. Things will be messy and random and not in order (just like real life). But they will include stories of tall ships, and road trips, police cars, etc. And anything else that just comes up.

The Ice Queen

Around 20 years ago, we kicked around the idea of retiring really early (we'd have been in our 40s), and living aboard Cinderella in the Virgin Islands. To supplement our income, in this fantasy, I'd learn marine refrigeration and air conditioning. Surely there'd be lots of demand for that particular service in the tropics! And it would fit nicely with my science background. I had known the theory of the refrigeration cycle since thermodynamics in college, so it would be a matter of working through the practical applications. I imagined it being both fun and profitable. I even named the business in my mind. Refrigeration girl? Ice Queen!

Although our lives didn't end up going in that direction, I've still always been intrigued by the process of making cold. It has an element of magic in a way that making heat doesn't. Humans have known fire and been making heat, by burning something, for thousands of years; we've only been making cold for a little over a hundred.  (Yes, we've had ice blocks and ice houses for longer than that, but that isn't actually making cold, that's mining it like a resource during the winter and storing it for the summer.)

The practical knowledge would have been nice to have. In the last year or so we've had one problem or another with either our air conditioning system or the refrigerator, it seems every couple of months. Last year, after our marina was partially destroyed during Hurricane Irma, we lived at anchor for several weeks. Fortunately the weather was benign during that time. South of town where we anchored was a nice combination of airy and protected. It was peaceful, with dolphins and pelicans for entertainment. Making our own power with solar, we were better off than friends in town who were in some cases still without power. It would have been a nice relaxing time to catch up on our reading and do some creative cooking, except the fridge was broken. Logistics and other complications of our location made it impractical to get to the store more than once or twice a week for fresh food, so we learned to make do with the fridge-less life, a bit of a challenge for people who love to play with food. We managed a small ice box for protein sources like cheese, eggs, yogurt, fish, and tofu, and explored canned food, dried beans and rice and pasta, powdered milk, and sturdy vegetables like carrots and cabbage. I now have 14 different classes of recipes featuring canned tuna.

I expected to feel really, really frustrated by this, on top of the stress of the hurricane. But we discovered something interesting over time. Dan described living without a fridge as "liberating." He meant it in two ways. It was liberating in that the fridge is often the biggest power draw on the boat. We chose the model fridge we did because it was just about the quietest and most energy efficient style on the market at the time (pretty much still is, shout-out to our 12-V keel cooler) and sized our solar panels to be able to generally make enough power to run it as long as the days are mostly sunny. But it's a close thing, and we have to be very attentive to our other power uses (lights, stereo, computers) so we don't go over our power budget for the day. Suddenly, without the fridge, we had loads of excess power. We didn't have to budget it, or watch the battery monitor, or just even think about it. Liberating. You know what else was liberating? In meal planning, we always have in the back of our minds, a running list of which foods are getting ready to go spoil and must be used soonest. Sometimes that leads to odd combinations of flavors as we prioritize, and sometimes we're just a step away from a cookbook that a cruising acquaintance fantasized about writing that would be called, "Cooking with Rotten Fruits and Vegetables."  We were pretty much liberated from that as well. On Day 1 and 2 after grocery shopping we might have broccoli or spinach, but after that it pretty much didn't matter, as everything that remained was shelf stable and we could eat it whenever. It was surprising that we'd never really noticed that nagging little voice in the back of our minds, until it was gone.

After our third service call on the unit in just over a year, our awesome marine refrigeration tech Chris cut into his own profits by teaching me how to charge the unit myself. I know, the real solution is replacement, and we've got that on next year's schedule. Hey, the thing is 15 years old, even a land refrigerator doesn't have a much longer life span than that. So we're just trying to limp this unit along until our haulout next year. Knowledge, self-reliance, independence? Most liberating of all!

Not Quite Like on Star Trek (Sheriff's Course, Week 3)

"Phasers on stun." When Captain Kirk issued this command, you knew our intrepid heroes were about to go into a situation. But their wonderful technology would give them the edge; they could temporarily incapacitate any hostile aliens without breaking a sweat, and an hour or so later the aliens would wake up again with no worse impacts than a bit of confusion and a mild headache.  So when I learned that we were going to talk about tasers last week, can you blame me for thinking that they were going to be similar to these convenient sci-fi gadgets? I mean, the names even rhyme!

Spoiler alert: real life is messier than even beloved nostalgic television shows. Real-life tasers are far more limiting than Star Trek's weapons. In real life, a taser shoots two tiny darts that trail hair-thin copper (?) wire to carry a 5-second electric jolt. And after that 5 seconds, it's over and they're up again, no hour-long down time to clean up. Range is limited to around 20 feet and those wires make a physical connection in order to work, so you're basically "tethered" to the person. There's lots of limitations (can't aim for the chest because if the person has a pacemaker the jolt could disrupt it, for example) and many opportunities for a miss. The two darts come out together and one goes straight and one curves downward so there is a good separation between the two to allow the electric jolt to be more effective, but that also increases the likelihood for one dart to miss the body, for example. This happened in the demonstration shot our instructor did for us, shooting at a life-size standup cardboard target with a photo of guy with his fists up, set expression on his face. So these things certainly aren't the panacea that are on TV. They can't just walk into a situation and assume they can safely zap their way back out of it.

Which led to a whole conversation about levels of resistance, 6 of them ranging from grumbling but compliant, through passively resisting, to physically aggressive; and appropriate escalating levels of response. You can know on an intuitive level about escalating and de-escalating, what seems appropriate and what would make the front page of the Washington Post, but this was the first time I had it articulated and quantified quite so clearly. I was listening, and paying attention, and taking notes, and the lecture made sense. However, I kept looking over at the target. Had he been just an ambiguous silhouette, or if he had the face of a certain political figure I am known to detest, it would have been different. It would have been easy to "shoot" him. But this guy? He was ordinary. He could have been someone I knew, could have been a neighbor or fellow boat-owner. I certainly made me pause for that extra microsecond. Stuff just got real.

The History Books Are Written By the Winners

Life can be more interesting if you're open to whatever comes along, spontaneous, go-with-the-flow. And I admit to having had more than my fair share of wonderful adventures that just dropped into my lap at various times in my life, just because I was in the right place at the right time and willing to take opportunities as they arose. Other times, though, it has helped us to have a bit of structure, a bit of a goal, else "leisure" can degenerate into "sloth." This was what seemed in danger of happening for us while we waited out hurricane season in a well-appointed marina in a quiet suburban area. There's only so many trashy novels you can read while hanging out at the pool. Our brains needed some stimulation.

I've written before about how viewing travel as a quest makes for a great way to frame and focus your experiences and serves as an interesting blog post writing prompt. The quests in my example ranged from profound ("searching for God") to profane ("searching for the best margarita in town.") So we started focusing our time in Jacksonville as a quest as well. We called it "M&M's" -- museums and microbreweries -- and planned to visit one of each, each week or two.

We've made more progress on the microbreweries than the museums, initially; having started with Hyperion Brewery during our first week. Our first museum was the "Museum of Southern History" in easy walking distance of the marina, which could as appropriately have been called "Museum of Civil War Artifacts and Stories from the Confederate Point of View."  There were weapons, uniforms, flags, incredibly detailed dioramas of significant battles, and a huge library.

Incredibly detailed and well-researched battle diorama; this is one small part of one of them. Another great image is on the museum's web page.

There were some examples of spin that left me pretty uncomfortable. At one point our conversation with the docent evolved to me asking, "If not for the war, do you think the Confederate states would have come around to freeing their enslaved people anyway?" And I was assured they would have, within fifty years or so anyway, for economic reasons if not moral ones.  "Because slavery made no economic sense after the industrial revolution" ... the failure to mention as inconsequential, fifty additional years of human misery based solely on skin colour, just got to me. But I also learned some pretty cool stuff and great context. The numbers were staggering. About 900,000 soldiers served the South, and 25% of the men who were eligible to serve during the war died. My hairstylist friend, a lifelong Jacksonville resident and student of history, went even further and told me -- while she was giving me a cute short haircut -- that she doubted there was a family in the South that hadn't been affected, lost someone to the war. The docent talked also about the time after the war, the tremendous cultural cost to integrate three to four million suddenly-freed African-American people, illiterate and not quite able to function in the larger society. Certainly not our finest hour as a nation, and certainly, there are subtleties to the story of that era. I'm glad I went, I have more to learn ... but I'm still uneasy.

Admiral Raphael Semmes, whose career is portrayed in this case, was an extremely successful commerce raider. He had a reputation for treating both his crews and his captives very well. Interestingly, he was also a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. Army and Navy at the same time? Interesting. 

The museum also had an extensive library. The row of ivory-backed books above Dan's shoulder contain a roster of every person who served the Confederate cause.

Several columns of Lunsfords. Also Lundsfords, Luncefords, Lumsfords, and Luntsfords. Only four Lindners. I'm not sure what, if anything, this means. In the Northeast, our two last names are about equally common. In the south, maybe not so much. (For the record, Lunsford is English and  Lindner is Austrian. Dan's family has been in the U.S. for 5 generations at least; Jaye's for 3.)